Media Room walkthrough - Part 5

Step 6 - The Projector

So now that the rest of the room is pretty much done, there's only one thing left to do... mount the projector.

Now, this is probably going to end up being the most expensive part of the entire process, because good projectors run anywhere from $500 to $5000, depending on what exactly you want. As usual, I was lucky, since I could rely on my friend Jared and his expertise in the subject. In fact, he had just recently gotten a new projector for Christmas, a Mitsubishi HC 1500, that was pretty highly rated and well thought of. He got his from Best Buy for somewhere in the $1200-$1300 range, which includes the protection plan they're always trying to sell you. When I started projector shopping, it was still around $1000 in price at Best Buy.

I checked around and looked at a few other models, but in the end I went with the solid bet and decided on the HC 1500. I checked on Amazon.com and lo and behold, it was selling for around $775! So I ordered it, along with a 25ft HDMI cable (around $30), and a ceiling mount for the projector (around $60). So with tax, I think the whole order cost me in the neighborhood of $950. And on top of that, I would get it in only 3-4 days.

The first two pics are of all the boxes and other stuff strewn about the floor when I got my delivery. And yes, it looks - and feels - like Christmas morning.

Here's a pic of the mount. This will let me hang the projector from the ceiling. Getting this thing mounted was a Herculean effort, and a story which I'll probably save for another post.

The box for the mount. I know... it's tough to contain your excitement.

The HC1500 is a 720p projector, with about 1600 lumens, which makes it plenty capable of handling my meager video requirements. I think ultimately, I'd like to get a 1080p projector, but the decent ones at this time are still around $2000 I think, so that will be a purchase that will have to wait just a little while longer. This is a budget media room, remember?

Here's a shot of the projector itself. It's very compact, not too heavy, and pretty easy to use. You'll see in this pic that it's actually sitting on the box, which is turned on it's side, and set up on top of my foosball table. Not the most ideal setting, but I really wanted to try it out. :)

The back of the projector. The power cord on the left, and the HDMI cord right next to it. Also has an S-Video port and a VGA port (and cable) so I can plug my laptop in if I want to.

Now, I didn't actually get this mounted until a few days after I got everything, and that's partly because it wasn't easy. I mentioned above that it was quite the task, and I'll save you the details, but it mostly had to do with not having all the right tools to get this done.

As you'll see in this pic, I attached the projector mount to a piece of white-painted wood, purchased at Home Depot (I think it was only like $6), and then attached the wood to the ceiling. The reason is because it's tough to be able to perfectly hit the cross beams in the ceiling just right with such a small mount. So the piece of wood lets me securely mount it to two cross beams, instead of just one, and thus feel a lot safer about hanging an $800 piece of equipment from my ceiling.

Here's a better view of the work. You can see that the wood is nailed to the ceiling and the mount is bolted to the wood. I put the nails in a different angles, to help hold in the wood, but i think ideally what I'll need to do is go back and screw it in. And I bolted the mount towards the back end of the wood, which allowed me to set the zoom on the projector about halfway and have it still fit comfortable on the screen.

In the above pic, you can also see two silver bolts in the bottom of the mount, nearest the projector. The mount comes with an Allen wrench that lets you loosen or tighten those bolts, and adjust the orientation of the projector. This way you can get the picture aligned just right, then tighten everything up to hold it steady.

In this pic, you can see that the power cable and HDMI cable are actually running from the projector, across the ceiling, to hanging hooks that I put in by the rear right speaker.

Here's a close up of the hooks. They're just the standard hooks that you screw into the ceiling to hang things. In this case, I'm using them to keep the cords out of the way.

Now the wire/cord situation is still less than ideal, but I haven't yet come up with a solution. Ideally, I'd have some of that plastic stuff that you can attach to the ceiling/wall and run the wires or cords through there. And that may be what I end up doing. But for now, none of it is in the way, and it's all behind the viewers anyway, so no one has really even noticed or said anything about any of it.

I'd also need to get a new HDMI cable before I can do anything to cover it up. The 25ft cable works, but it's really the barest minimum in length that I need to connect the projector to the receiver and not have it pulled tight anywhere. What I really need is a 30ft cable, so I'd have the extra slack to have it run along the corners and not pull on either the projector or the receiver.

Also, I need to mention an additional purchase. The power cable for the projector isn't long enough to reach the outlet when mounted on the ceiling. But it is a standard PC-type power cord. So I just went to Fry's and bought a cord extender, which is basically a 1ft long power cord that connects two other cords. Using that, I attached a second cord that I already had, and more than doubled the length of the power cord, allowing me to run it across the ceiling and hang down to the outlet as you saw above. The extender was only a couple dollars too, maybe $3 if I remember right.

So there we go. I got the Projector, got it mounted, and got it connected, and all for around $950. That brings the running tally to around $1550 just to get to the point where we can use the media room, and if I remember correctly, the original budget was $1500. So I barely stepped over budget, but that's ok. It was worth it.

So now that we have everything set up, come back for Part 6 and see how it looks!
http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/06/media-room-walkthrough-part-6.html